It was full of heart as well as art, a feat achieved in other works too: The Real Thing (1982), about the quest for something "real" onstage and off, and The Invention of Love (1997) about classical scholarship and the emotional repression of AE Housman, as contrasted with Oscar Wilde.
Does Stoppard the man largely stand outside his work? Given how diffuse the subject-matter is, it's tempting to see his career that way; yet his work tells much about him.
Rock 'n' Roll (2006) about a Cambridge university lecturer who returns to Czechoslovakia in 1968 at the time of the Soviet-steered invasion, floated thoughts about what Stoppard's life might have been like had he stayed in his homeland instead of fleeing (with his immediate family, before the Nazi invasion in 1938).
With Leopoldstadt, Stoppard — born Toma Straussler in 1937 — will bring back from the past the district of Vienna that was, in 1900, home to a substantial Jewish population. He has acknowledged it as a means of summoning his ancestral ghosts.
As his biographer, Ira Nadel, noted: "The first eight and a half years of Stoppard's life are a story of 20th-century displacement and loss."
His maternal grandparents died at Terezin deportation camp, his paternal grandparents likely did too; two of his aunts died at Auschwitz.
Stoppard, who took the surname of the British Army major his widowed mother married at the end of the war, has thrived in his adoptive country. Yet his personality as an artist bears strong traces of what was left behind — you could say it's in the DNA of his writing.
"[It is] essential to remember that Stoppard is an emigre," critic Kenneth Tynan wrote in a 1977 profile in the New Yorker, citing a director who told him: "You have to be foreign to write English with that kind of hypnotised brilliance."
Stoppard's European (Jewish) heritage, the loss of it and exile from it, is expressed in his writing, just as, to this day, he retains a Middle European accent.
He is preoccupied with personal freedom, fate, choice. Billed as a "passionate drama of love, endurance and loss", there may be something of a knowing swansong about Leopoldstadt, a coming full circle.
It may prove his most intimate work. Yet rather than being regarded as an anomaly, it should bring to the fore the role that the vanished arcadia of familial and cultural connection has played across his thinking — and feeling — as a dramatist. He once joked that he was a "bounced Czech".
Above all, it should underline that his ancestry has been the subtle wellspring of his artistic distinction.
The play opens at Wyndham's Theatre in January 2020.
